Test results. The doctor will see me now. I wait in the room with my back to the door, gazing out the window like they do in the movies. A high rumble outside as two skaters wend through the cars in the parking lot below. Muffled conversation and shuffling papers in the hallway outside, the footsteps at the door. My hands are behind my back. Clickety-clack outside and yaaawn goes the door behind me. I turn. “Hey Doc”, I say, just like they do in the movies.
“I’ve got to tell you,” he says, before we sit. “My two sons were pretty impressed when we left the restaurant that day and they saw you skateboarding in the parking lot.” He was probably concerned about my mental health that day, months ago, when he’d seen me standing stone-faced staring down the barrel of a 6 foot gap. His car horn had awoken me from my dream, wherein I’d attempted the leap. “You don’t see many forty year olds skating…”, he continued. I know,” I say, “I’ve looked.” We laugh and joke and wear the conversation down. Chips and ribbons of talk fall away. They litter the floor until all that is left are the test results. A tale lain in form beneath that wood since before I was born.

I’d sleep and dream. How to flip, lean, bend and land. I would see skate tricks in my sleep. Its like anything else, I’m sure. The solution to any niggling problem can come to a young engineering student in his sleep. I would wake, alert and armed with fuzzy memories of things I’d seen myself doing in a nocturnal sesh. I learned there, that it’s not just your feet. The board is not the variable, you are. The board is static. It is going to be there whether you are or not. It will sit in your garage or hang on your wall unless acted upon by you, the unstoppable force. So I was saying, it’s not just how your feet work with the board, but your back. Your balls. Your knees, shoulders and your arms and your elbows and your wrists and your fingers and your fucking tongue. Your body is a whip that needs to lash just right and make this piece of wood with wheels and steel come back to you. You’ve got to get it to agree with you (the leap of faith that the ollie is). Make suggestions and get the wood to say, ‘yeah, I could see myself coming back your way…’ and then convince it to do just that in the air above wet stairs under sodium lights in the middle of the night. STOMP. Cheers. God DAMN. They may have thrown the winning touchdown or finger-blasted the prom queen but we, after eleven (yes) hours of skate sweat and a miles of road rash from innumerable spots and that handrail we could not conquer… When we finally stomp that gap by the Dairy Queen, son, we go home and we’re dirty and we sleep like champions ought to. Remember that?

In the summer of the year of our Lord nineteen eighty-five I wake up. Bolt upright and all that. I stretch but I don’t need to. I’m a young man. Blessed and dressed in whatever. I don’t even have to eat anything if I don’t want to. I head to the garage and  get on my skateboard. I feel it’s shape accepting me. My shoes find their groove. I rock it back and forth to get my legs while the grommets complain. God but I’m up early. Its cool but I’ll warm up. It smells like tools in here, oiled and shiny. The garage door slides up, a rhombus of morning light yawns across a cement floor that is so clean it looks soft. I wait to press the button again and do the Indiana Jones. That first jump on the deck. Drag the tail for two or three stutter-steps. The lean of a lean body in space. Wheels touch pavement and the sound is a SHOUT.
May I have your attention please?
Water from a hose wavers as a neighbor turns to see where the gunshot came from.
Two dogs on either side of the street swivel their heads in my direction, primed.
A child cries (Oh now its ‘The Untouchables” — I’ll dial it back ).
Okay, a child doesn’t cry but a driver honks at me ’cause I’m on a skateboard and clearly a bad person. I spill out onto the street.

For me it was the speed. The longest, biggest stride on the smoothest asphalt. A teenaged Vitruvian. One foot on this platform, arm forward and back leg out I am the perfect specimen. Fast. Inside the houses I surf by, the families, my sound is like steel-on-steel going nine-oh in the AY EM. An ungodly aural attack, levied on them by what must be a drool-caked, drugged-out punk rock hooligan fucking with the status-quo! Here, heartless retrospect sneers, looks down it’s nose at me and tells me that I was probably the worst dressed skater, nay, teenager in the world. No style. Shorts that were too short. Ankle socks w/yellow Chuck Taylors and probably still wearing whatever shirt my mother had left out. An untamed Afro, and glasses like Chief Brody. But I felt like Batman.

This does not matter. My heart sings and I get it all. That whole of the meat of that Kick/Push. At speed, on deck, prairie winds whip at me and my t-shirt sounds like a flag. I am the captain of some small  flying machine screaming low in restricted airspace and NO CLEARANCE. I sound like a TIE Fighter. That’s what I hear. I’m skating and I’m Superman and Spider-Man and Steve Caballero and the kink my neck when I howl by. I am a pilot. The weight and balance I commit ensures that, for now, a curb or tiny rock can’t end this flight and I’m alone two and one-half inches above the planet and I’m reborn every time I get on this thing…

The sun is up and out. I Kick/Push and ollie a curb. Carve the inclined driveway, if I’m so inclined. Pop over (through) the fledgling bush separating two other driveways and ollie, BAM! on back down. Rough asphalt here for a half block stretch where the empty lot opens up… No driveways just kTAK kTAK kTAK picking up speed and ’round the bend past Gibson’s place and now I’m warm. The sun I’ve got a lifetime to be under wobbles like a spinning dime and I slide around that corner and there are no phones and geez I hope my friend is home and Kick/Push into a rock grind and at any other time in my life on my back in the street is a bad thing. Here, it is the cost of doing business. I lay there laughing at the wanna be scar on my skin. My elastic, electric skin. (“JESUS!, Mother would say. “What happened to your legs?” I’d have to look to see what she was talking about, because I have a scar, but I don’t remember getting hurt — because it didn’t hurt). Get up/Stand up and keep rolling and I turn up your driveway, pop my board and I’m at  your parent’s door ’cause let’s go skate, MacDonald.

I ring the bell and my back is to the door, just like they do in the movies and thank God you’re home, ’cause who would push me? You’ve got a piece of peanut-buttered toast in your mouth and you don’t even really look me in the eye when you come to the door. You lean out, take a manic glance at the sky behind me (it might rain today but better to be at a spot and need shelter than to never have made the trip), then at your own feet. In that time you have cleared the busy schedule that an adolescent boy has. “Cool.” you say and slam the door. I wait a moment and hear the whirr of the garage door. Open. Click. Closing. Whirr. Indiana Jones. Gravity rolls me backwards, I one-eighty then you and I meet and pick up speed down the driveway. We look west like a pair of kings with meadows of concrete to lord over.

Kick/Push.

Five  hours and a thousand laughs later we’re in a back yard across town at the top of a ramp with only a little more flat than vert. What neighbourhood is this? We don’t even know these guys. In the back alley, so, like, RIGHT THERE, a dust cloud passes and a big Pontiac slows in the noonday sun. Tires crunch on gravel. More dudes. My deck hangs out into space over a jagged canyon made of stolen wood. Dark screwheads pepper the landscape below. Bent nails drool with tetanus. Toothy slivers snarl from corners of de-laminated plywood that yawns at the seams. A wild sickness in my heart. And Abandon. Drop in.

A ramp like this, a yard like this, everything is pretty tight, transition wise. You’ve got to think three tricks ahead. That or improv. Ramp sucks. Ramp rules. Didn’t matter. We ride this kitchen sink for 3 hours until

my eyes water from going so fast. Tilting through town on a hill that drops 2000 feet in nine kilometers and when you are done you are at the bottom of it in another town. We are already moving pretty good. Ha Ha! The Litigators are battling gravity with big, fat, buttery slides that sound like Sasquatch ululations to the townsfolk below. Eight boys bark at the moon with no lights or helmets and I’ll be damned if one of us isn’t rattling hard, handling this business in a shopping cart. Cunningham. Its a dark and wide and windy vehicle-ridden death-race moving at speeds somebody clocked once but it doesn’t matter. Seventy-something-or-other. Monster hill in the

Dark and I roll at speed towards a double-set of stairs in front of a school somewhere in Yukon Territory. I wanna lift up sooner so I’ve got enough space to brace for the ollie over the second set. You wanna just make the first set. I need enough space, I stick it and I think I’ve got enough space and it actually turns out that I actually don’t actually have enough space and my front wheels dip and I twist with the might of a man in a boy’s body and it isn’t enough, actually. My tailbone hits every one of the six steps, lovingly overbuilt by contractors, with steel edges and tread plates that help regular humans deal with going UP these things in an arctic winter. I am down in the summer. Bad back, probably forever, and a sprained ankle. I remove my sock and tie it around that bad ankle to keep the swelling down. Keep skating and end up thinking, despite the slams and being kicked out of places, what fun this is and that

half of this shit, maybe more, but at least half of this shit was just being with you, friend. Crowding into Gaffney’s house when a new skate vid came in the mail. That’s right. We sent away. Maps to the skaters homes. Together we breathed in an ionic air. Autumnal winds carried our frozen breath above plywood monolith. We chilled on well-worn curb. Dined heartily at 7-11. Joked jokes. Jumped ramps. Sped with speed. The Lit-Mob and the run that is its namesake still snakes through the trees. When I was with you the high rumble and the roar and the rolling shout of us was absolutely gorgeous. We stormed beaches of boredom, a squadron of Super Weirdo Solidarity wrapped in the flag of some teenaged country. I’ve never felt more inside than being on the outside with you, brother. You marginalized four wheeled fuckhead, thank you if you rode with me. Even if you were just a knowing rogue nodding your as we slipped by each each other, slung low, in those salty Peter Pan days before any of us were ever on TV. Those times are never far from my heart. If you are reading this, then we may have ridden a road or a ramp together. Shared long shadows stabbing the light in some loading dock. Carved the teeth of Seven-Mile Dam. I don’t know what you are doing today but I am thinking of you as I roll around this parking garage, ALL’s “She’s My Ex” blasting in my ears.

The test thing was never a big deal. I just needed a lead in to make it seem serious like they do in the movies. My doctor says I’m doing fine and I should keep exercising. He’s a good guy and we joke around. He says I’m in great shape and that my father has left me a gift. High cholesterol. It could be worse. We stand and shake hands. “You know,  you’re not fifteen anymore.”, he says with a smile.

Why wild my heart then, when I hear that high rumble?